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Boll Weevil Blues
Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region’s chief cash crop—tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from polic...
Poison Powder
In 1975 workers at Life Science Products, a small makeshift pesticide factory in Hopewell, Virginia, became ill after exposure to Kepone, the brand name for the pesticide chlordecone. They made the poison under contract for a much larger Hopewell company, Allied Chemical. Life Science workers had been breathing in the dust for more than a year. Ingestion of the chemical made their bodies seize and shake. News of ill workers eventually led to the discovery of widespread environmental contamination of the nearby James River and the landscape of the small, working-class city. Not only had Life Science dumped the chemical, but so had Allied when the company manufactured it in the 1960s and early...
Notes on Vermin
Vermin—rats, cockroaches, pigeons, mosquitoes, and other pests—are, to most people, objects of disgust. And vermin metaphors, likening human beings to these loathed creatures, appear in the ugliest forms of political rhetoric. Indeed, vermin imagery has often been used to denigrate poor, foreign, or racialized people. Yet many writers have reclaimed vermin, giving new meaning to creeping rodents, swarming insects, and wriggling worms. Notes on Vermin is an atlas of the literary vermin that appear in modern and contemporary literature, from Franz Kafka’s gigantic insect to Richard Wright’s city rats to Namwali Serpell’s storytelling mosquitoes. As parasites, trespassers, and collectives, vermin animals prove useful to writers who seek to represent life in the margins of power. Drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural studies, eco-Marxism, and biopolitics, this book explores four uses for literary vermin: as figures for the repressed thought, the uncommitted fugitive, the freeloading parasite, and the surplus life. In a series of short, accessible, interlinked essays, Notes on Vermin explores what animal pests can show us about our cultures, our environments, and ourselves.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies
Providence Canyon State Park, also known as Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon,” preserves a network of massive erosion gullies allegedly caused by poor farming practices during the nineteenth century. It is a park that protects the scenic results of an environmental disaster. While little known today, Providence Canyon enjoyed a modicum of fame in the 1930s. During that decade, local boosters attempted to have Providence Canyon protected as a national park, insisting that it was natural. At the same time, national and international soil experts and other environmental reformers used Providence Canyon as the apotheosis of human, and particularly southern, land abuse. Let Us Now Praise Famo...
The Whole Machinery
"A familiar story holds that modernization radiates out from metropolitan origins. The whole machinery explores representations of people and places, objects and occasions, that reverse that trajectory, demonstrating how modernizing agents move in a contrary direction as well--from the country to city. In a crucial reversal, these figures aren't pulled by or into urban modernity so much as they bring alternate--and transformative--iterations of the modern to the urban world. This book upends the U.S. South's reputation as retrograde and unresponsive to modernity by showing how the effects of national and transnational exchange (particularly via the cotton trade), emergent technologies, and i...
Beyond the Mountains
Beyond the Mountains explores the ways in which Appalachia often served as a laboratory for the exploration and practice of American conceptions of nature. The region operated alternately as frontier, wilderness, rural hinterland, region of subsistence agriculture, bastion of yeoman farmers, and place to experiment with modernization. In these various takes on the southern mountains, scattered across time and space, both mountain residents and outsiders consistently believed that the region's environment made Appalachia distinctive, for better or worse. With chapters dedicated to microhistories focused on particular commodities, Drew A. Swanson builds upon recent Appalachian studies scholars...
Unredeemed Land
Unredeemed Land examines the ways the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves reconfigured the South's natural landscape, revealing the environmental constraints that shaped the rural South's transition to capitalism during the late nineteenth century.
From Swamp to Wetland
This book chronicles the creation of Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. This effort, which spanned 1928 to 1958, was of central importance to the later emergence of modern environmentalism. Prior to the park’s creation, the Everglades was seen as a reviled and useless swamp, unfit for typical recreational or development projects. The region’s unusual makeup also made it an unlikely candidate to become a national park, as it had none of the sweeping scenic vistas or geological monuments found in other nationally protected areas. Park advocates drew on new ideas concerning the value of biota and ecology, the importance of wilderness, and the ...
The Modern American Metropolis
The Modern American Metropolis: A Documentary Reader introduces the history of American cities and suburbs through a collection of original source materials that historians have long used to make sense of the urban experience. Carefully integrates and juxtaposes the primary sources that are at the heart of the collection Revisits and compares issues and themes over time Reveals how the history of cities and suburbs is not limited to buildings, innovation, and politics, and not confined to municipal boundaries Explores a wide variety of topics, including infrastructure development, electoral politics, consumer culture, battles over rights, environmental change, and the meaning of citizenship
A Golden Weed
Drew A. Swanson has written an “environmental” history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurtured it, but as the author provocatively argues, the choice of crop initially made perfect agrarian as well as financial sense for southern planters. Swanson, who brings to his narrative the experience of having grown up on a working Virginia tobacco farm, explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. He weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this innovative study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.
